Page 2 of Reaper

The one Brees had knocked down inside the room with us attempted to get back on his feet. Frighteningly long and sharp, chitin bladed-pincers grew from his forearm as the Kryptid initiated the shift into his battle form. But the Creckel female cut him off. Unfolding herself, she struck him with three violent blows of her wide, flat tail, shattering the chitin plates that covered his thigh. Without missing a beat, she spit some of her acid into the open wound.

I thought my eardrums would burst from the shrill sound that tore from the Soldier’s throat. Thankfully, with a couple of swift swipes of her talon-like, vicious claws, Brees smashed the armor around the Kryptid’s neck before slashing his vocal cords.

The other Soldiers never made it to the lift. Like a hungry swarm, the Creckels had knocked them down and were tearing them limb from limb. But I had no time for the bugs. After helping my mother up, we both ran to my father’s side.

Both of my biomedical expert parents had shared some of their scientific knowledge with me from a young age. According to my mother, despite me only being eleven years old, she believed I would qualify for pre-med school. After all, there had been nothing else for a child to do in this base. And I’d certainly learned enough to know my father’s wound was a critical one.

“Go get the hover stretcher so that we can get him to the lab,” my mother ordered, while applying pressure to stanch the bleeding.

My stomach churned at the sight of the organic membrane on the floor greedily drinking my dad’s life blood. If we didn’t get him off the floor soon, the membrane would consider him as organic waste and digest him to maintain and repair itself.

I ran into the lab—located a few doors from where my father had fallen—and rushed to the hover stretcher. I set it to manual navigation so that I could get back to my parents faster and hurried back out of the room. Just as I was turning into the hallway, the chime of the lift returning startled me. The door slid open, revealing a tall, black, cone-shaped device sitting in the center of the lift. I had no idea what it was but knew at a visceral level that it would harm us beyond words.

A second later, a small hole opened in front of it, projecting a yellowish smoke that immediately wilted the membranes covering the walls alongside the lift.

“MAMA!” I shouted.

“RUN!” my mother yelled before jumping to her feet to come towards me.

But at the same instant, a blinding light exploded before my eyes, stabbing so hard at my pupils I believed white hot daggers had been impaled into them. A thundering roar deafened me as a violent explosion rocked the base. I flew backwards then landed on the floor with a loud thud, stunned but screaming in excruciating pain. My eyes felt as if they’d been ripped right out of my skull.

Half-delirious with pain, I felt a Creckel snout against my cheek before sharp teeth closed around the collar of my t-shirt and dragged me into the great hall. A sulfurous scent reached me, making my lungs instantly burn. But even as I writhed in agony, countless Creckel bodies surrounded me, and moments later, my mother’s warmth. She pulled me into her arms, the wheezing sound of her breathing confirming she’d inhaled too much of whatever that gas was.

A few more explosions shook the base as the Creckels formed a protective dome around my mother and me. By the time the noise and shaking ended, I knew two things beyond the shadow of a doubt. First, we’d been entombed in this secret lab. And second, I would never see normally again.

Chapter 1

Janelle

My dried, parched throat ached at the sight of the somewhat murky water sparingly raining over the vegetables in the greenhouse. There was enough for me to drink, but I couldn’t afford getting sick again. Boiling it didn’t do as much good as it once used to. My stomach hurt just at the thought of the spoiled liquid inside my belly. That my damaged eyes could clearly see the wrongness of the water’s color spoke volumes as to its current state. It had been getting worse over the years, but we were now truly reaching the tipping point.

Even the vegetables were a shadow of what they once had been. The glorious greenhouse Mom had built within the base decades ago was such a distant memory that sometimes I wondered if I’d imagined it. The spinach leaves hung pathetically, looking almost wilted. It wasn’t all that surprising considering the soil was exhausted. And the fertilizer provided by the membrane had become as terrible as the water.

Putting down the watering can, I blindly reached for the basket in which I collected the few greens that were mature enough to be consumed. Everything smelled bad: the water, the food, and especially the membrane. It was too old, rotting on the walls and on the floor it had been meant to protect. The organic tissue had once been a healthy burgundy color. Its soft, cushiony texture had covered most of the base except for the ceiling that had the ventilation membrane pockmarked with alveoli. The membrane had kept the base clean and in good functioning order back when we still received food and steady supplies. It consumed soiled water and organic waste, using them to repair itself or recycling them into clean water or fertilizers. There was a time, it even produced a protein paste that could have replaced a meal.

But now, lack of fresh food for the membrane had taken its toll. What parts remained had a greyish hue. Or rather, it did back when I could still see colors clearly enough. Now, with the increasingly faltering optical aid Mom had built for me after the explosion, I could only see blurry shades of grey. As my other senses picked up while my sight dwindled, the sickly-sweet scent that rose from the membrane explained much and more. There was none of it left beneath my feet. I’d begun wondering if the membrane had eaten part of itself to survive. Beyond the sections burnt and destroyed in the explosion, why else would so much of it have disappeared over the years?

The Kryptid underground laboratory where I was born had been my home, my shelter, and my prison for the past thirty-one years. And in the next few weeks—a month at best—it would become my tomb.

I dragged my feet down the hallway to the hatchery to feed the larvae. My parents had initially raised them for some properties of the slimy mucus they produced, which they used for their experiments. Today, the larvae constituted our only remaining source of protein.

The stench that welcomed me made my stomach churn. The walls of the medium-sized, semi-circular room that was directly carved into the stone were lined with glass tanks once filled with larvae. Now, only the largest one in the middle still teemed with life. Or rather, writhed with the last few weak survivors. My heart sank at the sight of at least two dead larvae. It had been happening more and more frequently, no doubt due to the bad greens I was feeding them, or whatever the contaminated water did to them.

The clicking sound of claws on the stone floor at my back alerted me as to Brees’s presence. Her rough snout bumped against my hand when she stopped next to me. The small grunt she emitted told me everything I needed to know.

I telepathically projected an image of feces to her. She snorted in agreement. I then projected the image of a flame and a cooked larva, but the female shook her head. My shoulders slumped. There wasn’t enough food to last us much longer. A few weeks back, Brees and the other Creckels would have eaten the dead larvae, but not anymore. They were rotten like everything else here. Later today, I’d offer them to the membrane, shuddering at the thought of what even murkier water it would produce after eating those corpses.

I fed the spoiled vegetables to most of the surviving larvae, giving none to the three biggest ones, which I brought to the worktable on the other side of the room.

Brees slipped her wide, flat tail under the sizable metal container in which we would carry the meat to the young and the rest of the Creckels. Folding the spiked sides of her scale-covered tail to keep it from falling off, she came to stand next to me as I began to slice the larvae into thin steaks. This one was pleasantly plump, too big for my hand to close around it. At least, my companions wouldn’t be too hungry today.

I dropped the slimy pieces of meat into the container. Even after carving all three creatures, the container looked pathetically empty. Brees insisted on us pursuing that old ritual. To me, it only made the terrible state of our situation even more glaring. There was a time, the container was so full that I never could have carried it to the great hall that now served as our living quarters. With the explosion having destroyed our former bedrooms, we’d moved the cages out of the great hall and settled there instead.

Brees’s imposing body gracefully swayed as she made her way out of the hatchery, dragging the container on her tail. I followed in her wake as we walked past the debris that blocked the old lift—the only way out of the base. Claw marks still defaced the stone and the metal from our countless efforts over the years to move some of it away to allow the Creckels to try and climb up the long shaft to freedom… in vain.

I felt slightly lightheaded and couldn’t say if the increasingly spare levels of oxygen or hunger caused it. Chances were, it was a mix of both. I hadn’t planned on eating any of the larvae. In fact, I had avoided it for the past few weeks. But the smell and texture of the vegetables I had brought for the larvae had convinced me otherwise. I feared I wouldn’t survive another bout of food poisoning, especially not in my current state of dehydration. As we reached the door of the great hall, I pushed it open, my arms trembling from the effort. This was also a toss-up as to whether my shakiness was caused by a lack of food or the door’s increasing disrepair. Brees had suggested keeping it open, but what little oxygen the alveoli on the ceiling still provided needed to be kept contained within the common room.

Despite our dire situation, seeing all the Creckels perking up at the prospect of food, especially the younger ones, always put a smile on my face. Trug, the youngest at three years of age—and Brees’s firstborn son—still struggled to rein in his enthusiasm. Folding himself into a ball, he rolled towards us before unfolding to stand on all fours.

---